A Trip to Typewriter Town

American poet William Jay Smith learned to type at Brown's Business School in 1935 and later began playing with typewriter illustrations (often referred to as ascii art) to amuse his young children. In 1968 he was appointed the 19th Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress and wrote over ten collections of poetry, of which two went on to be nominated for the National Book Award. He published over twenty books of children's verse during his career, illustrated by many such distinguished artists as Caldecott winner Roger Duvoisin and AIGA medalist Ivan Chermayeff. In 1960 he wrote the children's book of verse, Typewriter Town, peppered with his own keyboarded typewriter illustrations. It is a visit to a world filled with monospaced glyphs and characters of every sort.   

::Images via Arthur Van Kruining's Flickrstream and the yhanblr tumblr.

The 1952 Typewriter Type Issue

In June 1952, Print magazine devoted an entire issue to the typewriter, "a machine to supersede the pen." The front cover, designed by George A. Shealy, cleverly illustrates the concept of an "imprint" from the artwork on the back cover. The endsheets are a nice pattern of alphabetical U&lc typewriter text. The design and layout of the remaining interior pages are far less interesting, but the content compensates for this shortfall. It begins with a short historical background of the typewriter, including an amusing letter Mark Twain typed for his brother in 1874, about "this new fangled writing machine." Historical sidenote: Twain's letter was typed just prior to his investment in the Paige Compositor, an early keyboard-operated typesetting machine that was soon overshadowed by the Linotype machine.

Because of the variable widths of the letters in our Roman alphabet, monospaced typewriter fonts have always had their limitations. I thought it was interesting to learn that the Crandall Typewriter Company was working on a proportionately spaced typewriter as early as 1881, but it was over fifty years later before even a modest success was achieved. In 1941, the legendary type designer W.A. Dwiggins spelled out some of his own challenges in designing new faces for the modern typewriter. He acknowledged the typewriter was for writing letters and not for composing books, and therefore shouldn't parody them. 

   

Companies could choose to have their trademark assigned to a customized key on their keyboard. Is that a real trademark, or the first smiley face emoticon above?

Ornamental typewriting was "used as training practice for aspiring stenographers." Had I known that artistic stenography was part of their job description, I might have considered this vocation. I do especially love the decorative borders created by the overlapping characters.

Remington Rand developed The Dual-Rite attachment to apply the first bold-weight strokes to specific typewriter characters, giving seniors everywhere even more an incentive to type everything in boldface ALL CAPS.

The Justowriter adopted the use of code for aligning text on a page, a complex maneuver at the time.

Inspector Remington here had the envious job as a poison pen typewriter sleuth. Below is a vast range of showings of the many faces designed for Remington and IBM typewriters.

Winter Poetry

From the top...as the snow flies:
"Jack Frost" by Lisa Park on Bēhance.
"Play This" by Geof Huth from Notation Notes.
"The Roof" by Cathal McCabe in The New Yorker, November 19, 2012.
"Il Pleut" by Guillaime Apollinaire, from Apollo13Art.
"hail, rain, snow" from swissserif.